Attention equals time. It's really that simple. To give someone your attention, it takes time. If it doesn't take time, then you're not really giving them your full attention. And if you're not giving them your full attention, you're wasting everyone's time - yours and theirs.

That's been on my mind lately as I get involved in more and more things. IRC, Twitter, trying to keep up with writing blog posts, reading blogs, development, etc. And that doesn't even include the real important stuff - family. Some of those things aren't negotiable. Family and the job can't really get pushed away. Twitter is my current obsession. What I realized was that I was paying less and less attention to my RSS reader. Oh, I was "reading" a lot of posts, but if I was honest with myself, I didn't really read most of the posts. I scanned, and I scanned quickly. I was subscribed to 750 feeds after all!

So that's where I pushed back. I decided I wasn't getting anything out of reading blogs anymore, and that was disappointing, really. I used to get a ton out of reading blogs, but I wasn't picky about subscribing to new blogs - it was easy, so why not just keep adding?

Well, I found out why - it's too overwhelming. Since that time, I've cut my feeds down to 203 subscriptions. I'd like to get (and keep) that under 200, but I'm struggling to find the fat right now. And I'm taking the time to actually read what's important and interesting to me, which was the point, right?

So what did I cut? Mostly non-development blogs. Engadget made the cut, but a lot of other tech news sites were didn't, as well as blog media, blogs that don't update a lot, blogs that don't post about relevant topics, etc. Of the 203 left, not all of those are technical blogs - there's a few personal ones in there. But the technical ones are good and relevant.

Frankly, things are under control now, and I feel much less pressured to "keep up" since that's not as hard now, and when I do fall behind, it's not that hard to get caught up again.